Acute Care Nurses
Acute care nurses provide advanced nursing care for patients with acute conditions such as heart attacks, respiratory distress syndrome, or shock. They care for pre and post-operative patients or perform advanced, invasive diagnostic or therapeutic procedures.
Patients who have experienced severe illness or trauma and require pre and post-operative care, or have other urgent medical conditions require acute care nursing. The acute care nurse job description focuses on improving a patient’s health with rapid intervention under time-sensitive conditions. They work with fewer patients at any given time who require complex monitoring and continued vigilance.
Acute care nursing is one of healthcare's most challenging disciplines involving the treatment of patients diagnosed with serious conditions in clinical settings like accidents & emergencies or intensive and neonatal care.
Acute care nurses' certification requires further training in intensive care spanning over one to two years, advanced certification, appearing for higher-level examinations and getting licensed. Other than required skills like critical thinking and decision-making in urgent situations, they need to be highly empathetic and compassionate, and able to communicate with and educate patients and their families.
They can find jobs in hospitals, ambulatory services and private home care and acute care nurse practitioner salary are usually high but there can be long and tiring work hours.
To be successful, acute care nurses should be prepared to think quickly, be on their feet, and adapt to the demands of ongoing medical situations.
Qualifications
Every career requires an element of study and academic qualification, and there can be several study routes and pathways you can take. In following any academic pathway you will study subjects that contribute to the specialised knowledge required to achieve your career goals. These qualifications provide a future employer with the evidence that you have the desired knowledge, understanding and experience of their industry, so it’s important to consider the various types of qualifications available to you and to understand how they can boost your career and create opportunities for you.
- M.Sc. Nursing
- B.Sc. Nursing
Tasks
- Analyze the indications, contraindications, risk complications, and cost-benefit tradeoffs of therapeutic interventions.
- Diagnose acute or chronic conditions that could result in rapid physiological deterioration or life-threatening instability.
- Distinguish between normal and abnormal developmental and age-related physiological and behavioral changes in acute, critical, and chronic illness.
- Manage patients' pain relief and sedation by providing pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic interventions, monitoring patients' responses, and changing care plans accordingly.
- Interpret information obtained from electrocardiograms (EKGs) or radiographs (x-rays).
- Perform emergency medical procedures, such as basic cardiac life support (BLS), advanced cardiac life support (ACLS), and other condition-stabilizing interventions.
- Assess urgent and emergent health conditions, using both physiologically and technologically derived data.
- Adjust settings on patients' assistive devices, such as temporary pacemakers.
- Assess the impact of illnesses or injuries on patients' health, function, growth, development, nutrition, sleep, rest, quality of life, or family, social and educational relationships.
- Collaborate with members of multidisciplinary health care teams to plan, manage, or assess patient treatments.
Progression Routes
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